So … we’ve been at the halfway point for a while now. My original plan was to do this every year, and that certainly doesn’t look feasible at this point. Though getting through half the countdown in one year is some progress, I guess. The countdown covered only PVs up to and including 2007, so all the fantastic videos from 2008 weren’t included. And seeing as how this will continue on into 2009 without honoring the 2008 PVs, here’s a list of the 2008 H!P PVs that I thought were noteworthy, in alphabetical order:

I have a puzzle for you all! But first, a few quick notes regarding recent releases:

Berryz Koubou’s Dschinghis Khan PV: This is definitely Berryz’s best video to date, and one of the freshest things to come out of H!P in recent memory. I had it on repeat for an obscenely long amount of time while I was working on the puzzle below. You can count on this being in the top 10 on the Countdown next year (speaking of which, I’ll resume this year’s countdown soon…), unless H!P manages to top this in the months to come.

Buono!’s Café Buono! album: While waiting for my physical copy to arrive, I listened to the tracks recently floating around on the Interwebs. I must say, this is by far the best album I’ve heard in a while, and I actually enjoy every single track. To put this in perspective, almost every one of my favorite albums has a few duds. Out of the entire corpus of non-classical music I’ve ever listened to, which spans a number of diverse genres, there is only one other album for which I honestly enjoyed every single track. That album was M2M’s Shades of Purple (2000). So this is quite an extraordinary achievement for Buono!, and I’m looking forward to the group’s future work.

OK, now on to the puzzle.

One of my hobbies is solving and writing puzzles, particularly the kind featured in the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. These are typically not traditional-type puzzles (crosswords, sudoku, etc.), though many of them borrow the format of traditional puzzles or combine different kinds of traditional puzzles. Generally, the puzzles come with few or no instructions (and those that are present are usually cryptic), and part of the challenge is to figure out how to solve the puzzle before actually solving it. The solution in each case is usually a word or short phrase. The entire Mystery Hunt is generally organized into rounds of puzzles, so the answers to the puzzles in each round combine to produce a meta-puzzle, and so forth.

Recently, I decided to combine my interests in puzzling and H!P and produce an H!P puzzle. The following is the result of an all-nighter soundtracked by nonstop repeats of Dschinghis Khan. I have another puzzle too, but I need to work out a few bugs before I can present it.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, while I love compiling rankings of works released by Hello! Project, I refuse to give a subjective ranking of individual people, for various reasons. But Paul Thomas’s new poll is just so shiny I couldn’t resist…

So here is my objective ranking of Morning Musume, Berryz Koubou, and ºC-ute, using criteria that (I assume) no fan actually uses, consciously or not, to determine their favorites, though the near-perfect (except Kamei) spectral order of MoMusu is rather interesting and makes me suspect someone on the inside might be using a similar criterion to assign costume colors…

Sure, it might be a coincidence, but really, the probability of at least n – 1 out of n elements randomly appearing in a specified order is .* In MoMusu’s case, n = 9, so the odds are about 1 in 5582.77. Hmm…

But before it actually begins, I’m going to hand out some honorable mentions. In fact I’m going to hand out 20 honorable mentions. This is actually a shameless, thinly veiled excuse to produce a Top 120 countdown without bothering to rank or discuss the bottom 20. But still … these were the noteworthy videos that almost made the cut. And there were some pretty difficult decisions to make, so I feel they all deserve a mention.

Welcome to yet another H!P-related blog. I’ve been lurking around the H!P blogosphere for the last couple of months and have finally decided to announce my existence, so here I am. Greetings. I am … uh … I have a couple of Internet handles but they date back to like high school and I need a new one. Let’s see… since this an H!P blog, and H!P is partly responsible for my coining a new word back in November or so, I’ll go with Kawaiirrhea. Here’s a definition:

kawaiirrhea (or kawaiirrhoea) [kʰəˌwaɪəˈɹiːə] n. : an overwhelming feeling of being inundated with extreme cuteness, as often occurs in conjunction with experiencing the output of Hello! Project (from Japanese kawaii ‘cute’ + Greek rhoia ‘flow’)

I’m a college student living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and taking probably too many courses, so I won’t be posting too frequently, except when I’m procrastinating, which happens frequently.

I will mainly be writing about topics related to Hello! Project and to a lesser extent, other elements of the J-Pop landscape. Also, since I’m something of a (multi-disciplinary) geek, you may find random unexpected intrusions from math, computer science, physics, linguistics, or literature (or other fields). Don’t worry; it makes sense … I think.